Info 435/635: Seminar on Applications of Information Science

Week 7: The Social Network behind Wikipedia

The week beginning March 5 will focus on Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/). Wikipedia is an example of "Commons based peer-production". Its entries show up increasingly as references, in course Web sites, and in scholarly articles. Some obvious questions: Does it work as well as it appears? How can it work as well as it appears? Can it continue to work as well as it appears? Specifically we ask the question: How does the social network behind Wikipedia contribute to the sustained high quality of the articles?

Monday, March 5

Before the Monday class read:

• Cosley, Frankowski, Terveen, Reidl, SuggestBot: using intelligent task routing to help people find work in Wikipedia. IUI '07, 2007.
• Bryant, Forte, Bruckman, Becoming Wikipedian. GROUP '05, 2005.

Last semester, Professor Dan Cosley gave a fascinating seminar on his research in this area. (See: http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/about/colloquiumFA06/Nov29.html.) He will come to the class on Monday, March 5 and discuss the Wikipedia social network and his research.

Wednesday, March 7

Before the Wednesday class:

• Read the general readings below.
• Edit an existing entry Wikipedia on some topic that you are knowledgeable about and post a comment to the appropriate discussion page.

In class, we will focus on the first paragraph in the article from the Cornell Daily Sun. Do we agree with its sentiments?

General readings

A good overview of Wikipedia's structure is in:

• Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Jesse Kriss, Frank van Ham, Talk Before You Type. HICSS-40, 2007.

There is a great deal of junk written about Wikipedia and some very insightful articles. Here are some general readings:

• Some self-referential history can be found at the co-founder's Bio.
• I personally like the discussion in the Probabilistic Age, December 18, 2005.
• The Nature comparison, Internet encyclopedias go head to head, Nature, 14 Dec 2005, and this editorial, are widely quoted but often misunderstood. (See: Nitpicking vs authority, 3 Jan 2006.)
• The Times article, 30 Dec 2005, is interesting in many ways including a discussion of why the LA Times experiment failed.
• Some controversy can be found in, Snared in the Web, 4 Dec 2005, followed a week later by some successful Sleuthing, 11 Dec 2005.
• On being notable in Wikipedia, 15 Apr 2006, is light hearted but makes some interesting points.
• There was recently an article in the Cornell Daily Sun on the use of Wikipedia in academic papers .

Research articles

There are also various research articles (the first contains additional useful background info):

• Analyzing and Visualizing the Semantic Coverage of Wikipedia ... (Holloway et al, 2005)
• Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the case of (Capocci et al, 2006)
• Wikipedias as complex networks (V. Zlatic et al, 2006)
• Studying Cooperation and Conflict between Authors with history flow Visualizations (Viégas et al, 2004)
• Measuring Wikipedia (Voss, 2005)
• Collaborative thesaurus tagging the Wikipedia way (Voss, 2006)